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Posts Tagged ‘Bell Labs’

You would probably have learned more about Ajoy Bose by reading his biography than by attending Jim Hogan’s gentle exercise in collegiality on Tuesday night, March 1st, in Silicon Valley. The conversation between these two giants of EDA, hosted by EDAC as part of DVCon week, was consistently unstructured, whimsical and seemingly without outline.

The next day, I sat in a coffee shop and struggled to find a handle with which to write a coherent summary of the previous night’s random access memory album. But that handle would not reveal itself.

Then I happened to glance over to a nearby table where another caffeine addict was buried in a book: The Man Behind the Microchip. I asked the addict who exactly was the subject of the book and the answer came back: Robert Noyce.

So Robert Noyce is the man behind the microchip, I pondered. The only man behind the microchip? Like Steve Jobs invented the iPod/iPad/iPhone? Or Thomas Edison invented the electric light?

No wonder, I realized, it was hard to get a handle on the previous night’s Hogan/Bose interview. They didn’t do anything. Robert Noyce did it all. And without help. Hogan and Bose did nothing, and ergo had nothing to offer their audience.

These two were not part of a vast conspiracy of contributors, all adding their particular drips and drops of innovation into the trickle of technology, that rolled into a small creek of creativity, that ran into a moderate-sized stream of science-turned-engineering, which poured into a roaring river of real change, which crashed into a seething sea of twenty-first century digital life.

Of course, that’s nonsense. Robert Noyce did not do everything, and Hogan and Bose did not do nothing.

Sometimes you just gotta wonder what happens behind the closed doors of the executive suite. Last June, when Synopsys acquired Atrenta, Atrenta’s founder – a distinguished technologist, alum of IIT Kanpur, UT Austin, Bell Labs, Cadence and Interra, and profoundly well-seasoned EDA leader – closed the door on his leadership role at the company he founded 14 years before.

I will admit, I do not know if Dr. Ajoy Bose actually ever reported to duty at Synopsys last summer – the received wisdom would have us believe he needed to set foot there long enough to help his team transition into the Big Purple – but in truth, it is hard to imagine him ever playing second fiddle to Dr. Aart de Geus or Dr. Chi-Foon Chan, or anyone else for that matter. He is a man of that much dignity and gravitas.

Of course, if Bose did punch a time clock at Synopsys, it was for nary a nanosecond in geologic time. It’s been 9 months since the acquisition and now Bose is clearly free to speak in public about the past, present and future of the industry he has helped to create. That surely would not be happening if Bose was just a node in the org chart that has Chan and de Geus at the top of the pyramid.

Dr. Pranav Ashar embodies the best of what EDA is all about these days, serving as articulate spokesman for the company’s technology, while tracking the wider view as well, the trends and future of the industry. I spoke with Dr. Ashar in early October and was impressed with his willingness to participate in an unscripted interview.

Our conversation was precipitated by Real Intent’s recent announcement of the 2014 release of its Meridian CDC product for clock-domain crossing analysis, which per the press release, adds enhanced speed, analysis and debug support for SoC and FPGA design teams, introduces a new CDC interface approach, a new way of debugging CDC violations, and a unique way to handle flat and hierarchical designs comprehensively. Dr. Ashar started our conversation by talking about the announcement.